(upbeat synth music)
- My name is Yannai Kashtan.
I'm from Oakland, and,
right now, I'm a rising senior.
My research this summer is the kind of jargony title is,
"Analyzing Charge Carrier Transport
in Organic Field Effect Transistors."
And basically what that means is
we're looking at trying to understand
how charges move through a new type of material
so that we can make more efficient devices
out of this material in the future.
I will say, so I'm probably not the kind of, prototypical
liberal arts student here at Pomona,
in that I'm taking mostly physics and chemistry.
But what I really love about Pomona,
and why I chose to come here rather than to go, say, to
a Harvey Mudd or some more technical-type of STEM school
is that I get to interact with people who are doing
something completely different.
Homeschooling, I ended up,
I kind of constructed a little chemistry lab in my garage,
and I was really into chemistry, not as much physics.
And I think the reason for that was because
as somebody building something in their garage,
chemistry is much more accessible.
Physics, the pieces of equipment that you need
to even do basic stuff are just much more expensive
so it's the, it was less accessible to me.
But when I got to Pomona,
I realized I really liked physics.
Maybe even more than chemistry,
and so I sort of,
I'm also majoring in chemistry,
'cause I still love chemistry,
but I'm, I've been sort of
gradually transitioning over to physics.
What I really enjoy about being
a physics and chemistry double major
is that it allows me to look at scientific problems
from two different angles,
and really have a good grounding in these two
different disciplines,
which are related but quite different.
The downside is the course requirements
for doing the two majors are large enough
that I don't have a ton of time to do
courses outside of those, out of those majors
especially since I'm also having to take a lot of math.
My work, my week generally has classes in the morning,
in the classroom,
and then typically three, sometimes four labs per week
in the afternoon,
and then I do my homework in the evenings
or on the weekends.
And sometimes I try to have a weekend free
where I can go off into the mountains
and go hiking.
Usually I spend a lot of my time in Millikan,
which is the physics building,
it's a really nice, new building
and it's a really nice space to study
and to both do homework and to do, to do research
'cause that's where all of the physics labs are.
Now what's nice is,
my schedule is starting to open up a little bit
in the summer,
I'm doing 40 hours a week of research
but I've got evenings and weekends to,
to spend.
I've been doing an independent study
so that's been taking up a lot of my time,
but now I'm hoping to,
I'm gonna be getting into the mountains some more,
doing hiking and trail running and some mountaineering,
which is really what I love to do,
kind of on my free time, so.
I'm enjoying this slightly more relaxed pace this summer.
I've been going up to the Sierras,
to the southern Sierras,
Scoti, Owens, Olancha,
and trying to aim for some of the fourteeners
now that the snow is melting.
My workflow is pretty variable, day to day.
If I'm making these devices,
these transistors,
then it's a pretty intense period.
So I'll start 8 PM one day, start the prep,
end at about 10:30,
and the next morning at about 6:30 AM come back in
and finish the prep
and then characterize these devices
with this imaging technique throughout the whole day.
Over the summer it's a pretty different pace
than the school year.
There are many fewer students on campus,
it's a lot quieter,
but there are still some things going on.
So in physics, for example, where there's a lot of research,
y'know, lab research to be done,
where you have to be on-campus to do it,
there are plenty of students still here.
In my lab, with Professor Hudgens,
there are two others, or now three other students
who are gonna, who are here,
doing research.
And sometimes we're in lab together, it's,
we're all working on our respective projects,
but it's a very friendly, convivial atmosphere.
And even though we're working hard,
y'know, there is company, there's somebody to go
walk to the village with, essentially.
And also in this interim,
it's an opportunity to cook for yourself,
to go out in the village and eat.
Professors are typically around and much more available
to your questions and concerns than
during the school year, when
your attention is, their attention is divided
between you and many more other students.
So, one thing that I would say that
was sort of the hardest stumbling block for me
first getting into research
was the realization that when you're in a class,
and you read about some law, or some
equation, some phenomenon that was discovered,
and you read in a couple of paragraphs
and you have a couple of questions of,
on homework, where you have to use that concept,
that was probably one or many people's lifetimes of work
and you're, just, zooming by it
at a hundred miles an hour in a course
when you're learning it.
And so to go from that kinda mindset,
where you're just absorbing information that other people
have already generated,
all nicely chunked for you in a textbook,
but you're the person generating that knowledge,
and that's a really special feeling.
You also just have to become accustomed to
frustration and things not working out
and feeling like you're putting all this effort in
and getting nothing back for awhile.
Until you do.
That's helped me be more confident that I wanna
go to grad school,
and it's also helped me narrow down within
grad school, which is, y'know,
you could study anything in physics,
to know that I really wanna be an experimentalist
and that I wanna be doing experiments
at the interface of physics and chemistry.
I've become pretty clear that I wanna do research that's
has something to do with both physics and chemistry,
that's experimental, and that
has a broader purpose,
and in particular,
it seems like with my scientific skill set
that broader purpose can be fighting climate change,
that would be a very useful
a use of my skill set.
I'm very happy with my choice of Pomona.
I think that I made the right choice to come here,
of all the places to go.